Often, these pages have certain formatting and procedural requirements. So your request might be moved or re-formatted by others at times. If in doubt, it might be better to ask for help at ja:Wikipedia:Help for Non-Japanese Speakers first.

Quite a few Japanese Wikipedians can understand English. Some Wikipedians who are mainly active on other language projects speak Japanese. Among them there are English-, French-, Italian-, Spanish-, and Korean-speaking Wikipedians.

See Embassy and Translation for the list of people who can understand Japanese and some other language(s).

Japanese Wikipedia is the 13th largest Wikipedia in terms of number of articles, having 1,058,900 articles as of 1 May, 2017. It became active at the end of January 2003 when the Wired News covered English Wikipedia and the news was translated into Japanese.

Pages with less than a definition of the subject may be candidates for a speedy deletion.

Page titles

In general, formal titles take precedence over less formal ones.

Except for some words written in Roman letters in Japanese, imported words written in katakana are preferred to those in romaji.

Copyright infringement

When copyright-infringing text is posted, the article must go through an article deletion process to have the infringing versions redacted by RevisionDelete. This is in contrast to other Wikipedias which may allow them archived as page history.

Redirects

Generally, redirects in a foreign script including the Latin alphabet and romaji are not welcome. They may be deleted.

Etiquette

Virtually the same as in other language projects, including the English Wikipedia. Not all Wikipedians follow it; again, like in other projects.

User page

In general, editing other users' "user pages" are not allowed.

Logged-on users vs. anonymous users

Some Wikipedians recognize the IP addresses of excellent anonymous contributors. Other Wikipedians regard "not logging on" as the sign of a lack of commitment or accountability.

Anonymous users are restricted in their right to deal with some community issues, including votes for deletion, votes for blocking and requests for adminship.

On Japanese Wikipedia, "foo (disambiguation)" style is rarely used. In many cases, "foo" is the disambiguation page with {{aimai}}. Aimai means ambiguity.

Some disambiguations e.g. ja:モモ (曖昧さ回避) are named "foo (曖昧さ回避)". 曖昧さ回避 (aimaisa kaihi) means disambiguation. In this case the article "foo" has a link to the disambiguation or a redirect to a particular page "foo (specification)".

Though most of the namespaces are localized, you can still use the names unlocalized too. For example, If you create a link as [[User:Username]], it will be automatically converted into a localized name like the above, when it is invoked.

Some auto-translations sites like Google Translate will help your understanding (but please be careful when using them - using them to post an article is severely frowned upon and usually results in deletion).

Feel free to contact our translators who will help you willingly. You can also contact active users via IRC channel #wikipedia-ja and ask about items on the Japanese Wikipedia that you're having trouble understanding. Please remember that the channel uses a different language code from UTF-8. You have to use the command /charset iso-2022-jp if you want to read Japanese messages on the channel #wikipedia-ja.

Another recommended way to clarify something is to put your question on the talk page you are interested in. The most commonly understood languages on the Japanese Wikipedia are Japanese and English, but some Japanese Wikipedians understand German, French, Spanish, Korean and so on.

Your contribution to the Japanese Wikipedia is always welcome. Many users will be willing to correct your Japanese. If you are afraid that your non-native Japanese might be seen as vandalism, put 校正お願いします (correction is requested) as a comment in the Summary or in the talk page of your contribution. See also Wikispelling for putting a comment in Japanese in Summary Box.

You don't have Japanese language support for the kanji/kana characters with your internet browser. Your browser probably has a language support download available at its website. If you are using Windows, you also need to install Japanese language support in Windows itself for some stuff to display correctly. Go to the Regional and Languages Control Panel and on the Language tab, check the box "Install Support for East Asian languages." This will usually require your Windows CD, around 250MB of disk space, and a restart when the operation is finished. This should correct this problem in all web browsers.